Surviving a long night of terror in Mumbai

Hotel, restaurant staff help guests stay safe

November 28, 2008|By Somini Sengupta and Jeremy Kahn The New York Times

MUMBAI, India — For Amit and Varsha Thadani, the night in the Crystal Ballroom of the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel was supposed to be a time they would treasure forever. It was the lavish start of a life together, with a wedding reception for more than 200 family and friends.

It may be an anniversary they will dread forever.

About 9:45 p.m. Wednesday, as they had just finished dressing for their party in a second-floor room, they heard the first crackle of gunfire, followed by commotion outside their room and instructions from the hotel front desk to stay put.

They did stay put, for more than seven hours, much of it huddling on the floor of their bathroom, trying to keep themselves calm. Their phones rang frequently with updates and questions. At one point, Varsha Thadani said, she stopped answering. She did not want to talk to anyone. There was more gunfire, along with two loud explosions, one of which flung open their door and windows. Next door, they heard gunmen shoot a female guest, and then her screams.

"We could sense she was being dragged around," Varsha Thadani said.

In the Crystal Ballroom, friends had begun trickling in. They, too, were startled by gunfire. Could it be firecrackers? one wondered. A window shattered, sending everyone scampering under tables, and then eventually, led by hotel staff, into a private, less accessible set of rooms. Ballroom by ballroom, restaurant by restaurant, guests were ushered into what was thought to be a safer part of the hotel, a private club called The Chambers.

At the Golden Dragon restaurant on the ground floor, a woman could see through frosted glass the gunmen parade through the lobby of the hotel and open fire any which way. She had come to celebrate her husband's birthday, along with both sets of parents.

They, too, were led through kitchens and staff stairwells into safer quarters, where they huddled until nearly 4 a.m. She and her parents slipped out through the back staff exit, but with so many cell phones trilling, they drew the attention of the gunmen inside the hotel.

They began firing at those trying to flee. Her husband and his parents were left behind. Eight hours later, in the shadow of the hotel, she stood waiting for them to come out. Her husband did not answer his cell phone. She was still dressed in her black dinner blouse.

The chaos at the Taj was just one part of the abyss of terror that swallowed the city.

At Leopold Cafe, a restaurant popular with foreigners, a Belgian tourist, here to indulge his love of Bollywood, described the sudden awareness of deathly peril and the desperate actions of the staff to protect their foreign customers.

The tourist, Ronny Quireyns, 44, was seated in the air-conditioned upstairs with friends - film extras just coming from a shoot - on Wednesday night. A little before 10 p.m., they heard a loud blast outside. Then they heard a series of sharp bangs from downstairs, he said. "A member of the staff rushed upstairs and said there were people shooting downstairs," Quireyns said.

The waiters pulled the cover off an air-conditioning vent and guided him and about 15 other foreigners to climb inside, he said. After about 10 minutes, Quireyns said, he crawled out and peered down the stairway to the floor below. He saw people writhing on the ground.

Finally, the waiters gave an all-clear, he said, and the foreigners fled the restaurant, where blood had covered the ground floor. Police officers took them to a nearby station to spend the night.

"It seems so surreal," Quireyns said. "You never think something like this will happen to you."

Gary Samore, director for studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, was staying at the Taj with his wife and daughter, squeezing in a family holiday in Mumbai along with a lecture he delivered earlier Wednesday evening. They, too, stayed in their room and tried to stay calm.

The television was not working. He had no local phone. Friends kept him apprised of developments by sending e-mail messages to his BlackBerry. At 3:30 a.m., Samore recalled, very heavy gunfire began. The U.S. Consulate called to say the hotel was on fire. The family collected their passports, made a set of wet towels to help them get through a smoky corridor and found their way to a service stairwell and then a second-floor terrace, from where they could summon Indian soldiers.

"My BlackBerry may have saved our lives," he said.

In the kitchen of the Chambers, Raghu Deora, the chef, hid under a table. Four gunmen came before dawn and found him. "What do you do?" they asked in Hindi, and then they ordered him to stand up and turn around. They shot him from behind, his wife, Nandita, said Thursday afternoon. There were four gunmen, he told her while recovering in Bombay Hospital, all in their mid-20s, well dressed.

Close to dawn, the newlywed Thadanis crept out of the window of their room, and with the help of firefighters climbed down a ladder and touched ground. On Thursday afternoon, they counted their blessings and ate a homecooked meal.